Читать книгу A Poached Peerage - Sir William Magnay - Страница 12

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Colonel Hemyock, the temporary tenant of Staplewick Towers, was a somewhat blatant specimen of a retired military man with an unbounded sense of his personal dignity and importance, which sense he derived from an aristocratic wife. Never in this world was there anybody more starchily dignified than the gallant Colonel looked as he sat bolt upright in his phaeton; a tall, thin, thread-paper of a man, with his sharp aquiline nose, and brushed out white whiskers, whiskers of which not a hair was ever seen out of line. But that was all. For the rest he might have been a figure from Madame Tussaud's with a phonograph inside.

As behind the horseman is said to be invariably seated Black Care, so behind the gallant driver of that phaeton were sitting the Colonel's two-fold cares, his two daughters. People who affected to know everything—and such are occasionally met with in the country—asserted that it was with a view to getting her daughters off that the scheming Lady Agatha Hemyock had insisted on the family's taking up its abode at the missing Lord Quorn's somewhat derelict place. And the policy had not been entirely without result.

But now with the discovery of the new peer the tenancy came to an end. It was simply left for the Hemyocks to close it pleasantly, and, some critics said, designingly, by entertaining the new owner for a few days, introducing him to his property, such as it was, and the Misses Ethel and Dagmar Hemyock, such as they were, and then leaving him to his own devices, and the result of theirs.

"Ah—ah, Popkiss," Colonel Hemyock said in his high, thin voice, acknowledging the bustling innkeeper's salute with a limited flourish of his whip. "I just looked in to say that—ah—Lord Quorn" (he spoke the name with absurd emphasis, shaping his mouth into an O twice as he pronounced it) "is expected to arrive here this afternoon."

So impressed was Mr. Popkiss by the stiff and immaculate Colonel's pomposity that all he could ejaculate was, "Dear me, Colonel! Lord Quorn?"

"Yes," responded the Colonel freezingly, as he stared straight in front of him over his horses' ears; "his lordship has just arrived from Australia."

"I have heard something of it, Colonel," said Mr. Popkiss, regaining his composure; perhaps because his noble visitor suggested by his attitude that he admitted him to no more human fellowship than the mounting block in the yard. "The late peer's cousin, is he not, Colonel? I trust you will not be giving up the Towers?" he added hypocritically, since the Hemyock establishment could hardly be said to bring two-and-sixpence per annum into the coffers of the Quorn Arms Hotel.

"I—ah, don't know," the buckram personage answered, still staring foolishly over his horses' heads. "Anyhow, his lordship will stay at the Towers for some time as my guest."

"Curious; in his own house, Colonel," fatuously remarked Mr. Popkiss, as feeling called to make some comment on the situation.

"It is my place as long as I pay for it," snapped the Colonel loftily.

"Certainly, Colonel; no doubt, Colonel; I beg pardon, Colonel," Popkiss protested abjectly.

A few heavy drops suddenly came pattering down on the glass roof of the yard.

"It is going to rain," Colonel Hemyock observed in a tone of irritated surprise at the outrage. "We shan't get over to Babbleton this afternoon." This to his daughters, who looked, in anticipation of harm to their finery, more discontented, if possible, than before. "We had better put up till Quorn arrives. You can wait here and I will look in at the club."

There was a waiting-room adjoining the archway for the accommodation of the county people who put up their carriages at the Quorn Arms while they shopped in the town. Shown in, with much obsequiousness, by Host Popkiss, the Misses Ethel and Dagmar Hemyock here proposed to spend a tedious and highly uninteresting half-hour. The prospect did not tend to lessen the grievance they entertained against the world in general and certain unappreciative persons of the male sex in particular.

"I wonder," observed Ethel, taking up and throwing down again the current number of the Bunbury Bulletin, "if father finds Sharnbrook at the club, whether he will have the sense to let him know we are here."

"It strikes me ignorance is bliss in Sharnbrook's case," replied Dagmar cuttingly, as she stood at the window, peevishly regarding the rain.

"Oh, shut up, Dagmar," her sister returned, with a surprising lack of dignity in one so highly born. "If it clears up we might take him over to Babbleton with us."

"If he'll come," said Dagmar sarcastically.

"He must come," Ethel declared emphatically.

"He has fought shy of us since he proposed to you," Dagmar remarked maliciously.

"And was accepted," put in Ethel decisively.

"Trust you," sneered her sister. "He has the bad taste to put down the proposal to the champagne. Mrs. Wyrley-Byrde told mother so."

"All right," snapped Ethel. "Not even father's champagne ever made any man propose to you."

"A man," retorted Dagmar pointedly, "requires to be in his sober senses to appreciate me. And if he proposed under the influence of Heidsieck, I should not accept him."

"Oh, wouldn't you?" returned Ethel with somewhat over-emphasized incredulity. "Anyhow, I am not going to let John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook slip through my fingers."

"Trust you," Dagmar laughed scornfully. "You'll hold him as tight as he was when he proposed to you."

"As he says he was," Ethel corrected.

"As he must have been," Dagmar maintained unfeelingly. "After all," the amiable young lady continued, with a yawn, "who is John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook that he should be exempt from matrimony? Better men than he have submitted to it. Julius Caesar was married—and——"

"And Alexander the Great," Ethel supplied as her sister paused for another notable victim of the marriage tie.

"Yes, I think he was," pursued Dagmar indifferently.

"If he wasn't, he——" she yawned again. "And Maryborough, and Edward the Black Prince were married men."

"So was Henry the Eighth," observed Ethel sententiously.

"Certainly. And Napoleon, and pretty well everybody worth mentioning, and heaps not worth it. And who, pray, is John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook that he should cry off and plead Mumm? Nobody!"

"He has four thousand a year," Ethel remarked in mitigation of her recalcitrant suitor's total extinction.

"And a pretty taste in fox terriers," supplemented Dagmar, with an air of making every possible point in the unhappy Sharnbrook's favour. "If he jilts you——"

"Impossible," Ethel cried heroically.

"Fish have been known to wriggle back into the water after they were hooked, played and landed," Dagmar observed sagaciously. She turned to the window. "Here he comes," she remarked coolly. "I advise you to fling him a little farther from the bank." She raised her voice to greet the half-hearted Philander. "Here we are, Mr. Sharnbrook. Come in!"

Mr. Sharnbrook thereupon came in, somewhat with an air of looking as though he would much rather not. He was a florid young man, of no strikingly apparent intellectual powers: he had straw-coloured hair parted in the middle, and a downy moustache to match. Apart from an aggressive riding suit his appearance was diffident to the verge of chronic apology.

"Left off raining," he remarked, in a vain desire to meet his enemies in the open.

"Has it?" replied Dagmar, indifferently doubtful. "Fancy your finding us here," she added disingenuously.

"Quite a surprise," he observed, with equal dissimulation.

"A pleasant surprise, I should hope. Aren't you going to speak to Ethel?"

Thus prompted, Mr. Sharnbrook was fain to advance and greet the lady whom for the last week he had been dodging. "How do you do?" he said with timid cordiality.

"How awfully gushing," laughed the voluble Miss Dagmar. "Of course, I'm in the way," she added significantly. "All right; I'll look out of the window."

"Oh, not at all," protested the miserable Sharnbrook. "Please don't."

"Oh, but I shall," she insisted. "I am interested in that delightful old market woman who has just driven in. Tell me when I may turn round."

"Now," said Sharnbrook, desperately bold.

"Dagmar, don't be absurd," protested her sister, with a provocative glance at her jibbing lover.

"I can't see behind me," Dagmar observed casually.

"None of your tricks, Dagmar," said Ethel, facing the wretched young man, and then turning her head as though to look at her sister, which manoeuvre had the intended effect of giving John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook a magnificent oscillatory opportunity.

But though the way was plain the will was absent. "No, no," protested the gentleman, hanging off; "I'm up to her game. You won't catch me, Miss Dagmar. She has only got to turn her head," he pointed out confidentially to Ethel.

"Oh, she won't—just yet," the lady murmured softly. "She had better not," she added, with a meaning smile.

"We had better not," suggested the harried Sharnbrook at his wits' end, desperately determined not to compromise himself before a witness.

"Oh, just as you please," returned Miss Ethel, with a disgusted toss of her head. "If you are so frightened."

"Oh, well," he urged feebly; "I don't want to make a fool of myself."

"Oh, it is not necessary," the disappointed maiden returned with scorn. "You may look, Dagmar."

"I didn't see anything," remarked that lady, with a malicious twinkle in her sharp eyes.

"No," said Sharnbrook, manifestly relieved; "I don't see how you could. So the new Lord Quorn is coming down to the Towers," he added, eager to change the subject.

"Yes," replied Dagmar glibly, wickedly rejoicing at Ethel's discomfiture. "We are expecting him now. Of course we haven't an idea what he is like. Frightfully colonial, no doubt."

"We've heard nothing of Lady Quorn," remarked Ethel, determined not to be behindhand in chatter, and so show her indifference to the love passage that did not come off.

Sharnbrook gave a smile of superior knowledge.

"There is no Lady Quorn," he said.

The effect of his announcement was startling. "No Lady Quorn?" the eager sisters cried in chorus, their expressions indicating design tempered with incredulity.

"Quorn's a bachelor," Sharnbrook maintained, beginning to see light behind the dark cloud which for the past fortnight had hung over him.

Miss Ethel turned to her sister with indignant reproach. "Dagmar! You said he was married."

"I—I understood father to say he was," that disingenuous young lady replied unblushingly.

Ethel, well acquainted with her sister's resourcefulness, turned from her in evident disgust. "Are you quite sure, Mr. Sharnbrook?" she inquired with purposeful determination to clutch the truth.

"I saw it in the paper," the now brightening youth answered. "There certainly was a report that he was married, or engaged, or something of that sort; but it turns out to be a mistake. He's a young chap, about thirty."

"How interesting!" Ethel murmured.

"Is he good-looking?" Dagmar inquired, with a suggestion of appropriating the new-found peer if he should be fortunate enough to touch her standard of beauty.

"Can't say," Sharnbrook smirked. "Sure to be if he's a lord," he added, with cheap sarcasm.

Dagmar crossed to Ethel and slapped her on the shoulder. "My chance, my dear; you're booked," she said in a determined undertone.

Ethel gave a repudiatory "Pooh!" and pushed her away. Dagmar walked serenely to the window. "I wonder if that is his lordship coming up the street?" she exclaimed suddenly.

Ethel ran to the window. "Where? Which?"

There was no one in view at the moment who could be supposed by any stretch of imagination to come up to even an unconventional idea of a peer of the realm, nevertheless the sanguine Dagmar pushed her sister away. The first sight of the waiting coronet was for her alone. "Never you mind, Ethel," she said roughly, "I am quite competent to look out for him. You amuse yourself with Mr. Sharnbrook."

Mr. Sharnbrook meanwhile was experiencing some difficulty in arranging a decent veil over his satisfaction. "By Jove, they've jumped at Quorn," he told himself gleefully. "If only—I say, Ethel," he said with sudden affection, to test the new phase of the situation.

Ethel pushed away the arm which had recklessly found its way round her, until lately inviting, waist.

"Don't be absurd, Mr. Sharnbrook," she protested snappishly.

"I shouldn't have been absurd just now," he retorted pointedly.

"You didn't take your chance, and you've lost it." The fact that she turned haughtily away prevented her seeing an uncomplimentary look of joyful relief in her recalcitrant lover's face. If only this Lord Quorn were a decent fellow and would back him up.

"What a time father is at that stupid club," Dagmar exclaimed impatiently. "And we have got to go to Babbleton. We've no excuse for not going now the rain has so provokingly stopped."

"Let's go and rout father out, and get back soon," Ethel suggested, not a whit behind her in eagerness.

"Come along, then, dear," said Dagmar, giving a preparatory look at herself in the glass. "Aren't you going to take your young man with us?" she added with a view to her sister's annoyance.

"Oh, you don't want to come, do you, Mr. Sharnbrook?" Ethel said with a somewhat obvious lack of cordiality.

"To Babbleton? Not exactly," replied the wary Sharnbrook with so much fervour that Dagmar laughed unpleasantly. His principal desire now was to get into the middle of a ten-acre field and sing a pæan.

"Come on, then, Dagmar," his soi-disante fiancée said with a toss of the head.

Dagmar drew back, however. "Say good-bye to your dear Jack," she suggested with ill-timed humour. "I won't look."

Ethel's face, under the fun, made Sharnbrook rejoice more than ever at the chance which, properly worked, might obviate any claim on his part to that ungratifying physiognomy. "Dagmar! How absurd you are; Mr. Sharnbrook does not appreciate the joke."

"Indeed!" her sister retorted in a voice which might, without violating the fitness of things, have been pitched somewhat lower. "I thought he was the only person who tried to see a joke in your engagement."

"Ethel!" He called her back mischievously, secure in his good fortune. "I was going to Carter's about a ring."

"Oh," she replied with a not very gracious nod, "that can wait. Catch me," she said to herself as she hurried after Dagmar, "catch me wearing an engagement ring while there is a bachelor peer in the house."

"Quorn's the man to save me," Sharnbrook murmured jubilantly as he strolled into the yard to see the designing fair ones off.

Mercy ran in to have a sight of her new mistresses from the window. A groom with a gold band round a weather-beaten hat, who looked as though he occasionally sought distraction from the monotony of stable-work in the more Arcadian occupation of gardening, came by, touching his hat to the ladies, then signing more familiarly to the landlord's daughter that he had a communication for her.

"Oh, Miss Popkiss," he said, as she opened the window. "Mrs. Dixon will be glad if you will come to the Towers to-morrow, as the other young lady is leaving to-night. One of our chaps will be in town and he'll drive you over."

"Very well, Mr. Tootal," she said archly. "I'll be ready."

Mr. Tootal glanced round and dropped from an official to a confidential tone. "I think you'll like us," he ventured to predict. "Our people are rather frauds, and stiff as boot-tops, but Lord Quorn is coming to stay, and we've hopes we shall wake up. Well, I mustn't keep old Wax-work waiting. O revoire." With a wink and an amorous flourish suggestive of future blandishments, Mr. Tootal ran off, while Miss Popkiss turned to the glass and contemplated her charms with much satisfaction. The magnificent possibilities of a life in a novel sphere were before her, and she meant to make the most of her chances. And, after all, as she told herself with her head held critically on one side, there is no knowing what a pretty girl may do if only she sets her mind to it.

So engrossed was she in the contemplation of her face and its probable effect upon the denizens of Staplewick Towers that she did not hear her father's approach.

"Do you hear, Mercy?" he cried in a tone of testy importance. "We are to have a distinguished visitor?"

"A distinguished visitor?" she repeated rather disdainfully. "Mr. Gillions, the big commercial, I suppose. It is about his time."

So far as an expansively fat face can express anything, that of Host Popkiss indicated withering scorn at such a suggestion. "Gillions! Commercial!" he repeated, in croaking contempt of even that potentate of the road. "I tell you the new Lord Quorn is going to stop here on his way to the Towers."

Miss Popkiss at once became interested. "When is he coming?" she asked with all the animation her father could desire.

"To-day," he spluttered—"any minute. So just get things a bit smart, and let's show his lordship our best face," and he bustled off.

"Lord Quorn! Our best face!" Miss Popkiss, with the nearest approach to a flutter of which her free and easy nature was capable, yet found time for another glance in the mirror. The result was clearly encouraging. "It's the only one I've got," she observed knowingly; "but I guess it will do."

Not being, however, quite satisfied in her mind as to the rival effects of pink ribbons in her cap, or blue, she ran off to her room to institute a comparison, thereby just failing to notice the entrance of a strange guest.